Michael Harley posted Bloggers, can we make better titles for our posts? This post caught the attention of Steve who replied here and which is why it popped up in my RSS reader.
The original post says roughly: we should give better titles to posts to make them more discoverable. Readers want to know what the post is about before clicking on it. Totally fair point. Michael also writes the following.
I think this one might be a bit unpopular but I do not like the round-up posts. You know the ones. They’re titled Week Notes, Week in Review, Weekly Links and the like. […] I do not click weekly notes from randos. For bloggers I know and have followed, I do often scan them.
Fine, but I really like week notes. I love reading them. I love writing them. When my pals post week notes, I eat them up because it’s like catching up with a friend. I love to hear the unfolding drama of peoples lives1.
Maybe, Michael doesn’t click on week notes because the titles are too boring. A few of my friends post week notes with pretty generic titles: “Week Notes 2026-N” or “Weeknotes: WN, 2026”. My week notes are currently titled in a rather mechanical way: “Week Notes N”. None of these titles spark joy. It is helpful to know that the post is a week note but most readers don’t need to know the exact temporal or serial coordinates of when it was posted2.
However, the serial numbers do serve a purpose.
One needs some kind of mechanism for keeping the series uniform and consisent.
I adopted three-digit3 serial numbers, such as week-notes-062.md, for naming the markdown files for the posts.
This numbering system made it easy to write a script hugo-week-notes that just brings up the current week note.
Similarly, hugo-week-notes-new makes a new one.
Serial numbering is helpful but it definitely doesn’t invite the reader in for a cup of tea.
Let’s come back to Michael’s post though. It has convinced me that I should have more interesting and meaningful names for my posts, and especially for my week notes. I will keep the internal numbering for the reasons outlined above, and keep Week Note in the title, but will add some character. For example, these recent ones are headed in the right direction.
A bit of an aside about the whole ethos of week notes. They’re originally a thing from business, see: Doing Weeknotes by Giles Turnbull. This ancestry makes them a bit productivity and metrics oriented and that energy bugs me slightly. It isn’t especially interesting to know how much steps someone walked in a week or just what media they consumed. I’d much rather hear stories from their life. Though, like, to be fair, I post about my reading and writing. Consumption and production. ↩︎
When my friend and mentor, Ruth Pincoe, was dying, a friend would send out a newsletter to keep everyone updated. She put a serial number in the subject of the e-mails so that you’d know if you missed an update. We were all keeping track of the number because we knew that every one of them counted. It’s different on the internet. I don’t (personally) mind so much if I miss a week note update from a internet friend since it’s usually not a matter of literal life and death. ↩︎
Early on, in Week Note 4, I wrung my hands a little bit about whether a three-digit serial number would be enough. I’ll still have name space to write week notes in 2044. ↩︎
Published: Jun 16, 2026 @ 16:14.
Last Modified: Jun 16, 2026 @ 20:47.
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